Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Peeping Tom by Rachelle Le-Monnier Mike Patton's Agenda: Touring With Peeping Tom, Humiliating Mark Hoppus And Danny DeVito. Peeping Tom frontman says fall U.S. tour in works; discusses Dan the Automator project. It was more than five years ago that Mike Patton's faithful followers first heard that the eccentric mastermind had started compiling a who's who of collaborators for a genre-bending project he was calling Peeping Tom. And for five years, those fans waited — wondering when, if ever, the inaugural Peeping LP would surface. The oft-delayed album sort of became the former Faith No More frontman's Chinese Democracy, with Patton devotees growing increasingly skeptical that the project would ever materialize. But unlike Axl, Patton delivered, and Peeping Tom's self-titled debut hit record stores two weeks ago at #103 on Billboard 's album sales chart. "I'm not quite that insane, please," said Patton, scoffing at the Axl comparison. "Give me a little credit, man! It was a learning process for me, making this record. Not having a band in front of you that you can sort of direct, and then press 'record' and say, 'One, two, three, four — let's go,' I mean, it was very different." Compiling Peeping Tom 's 11 tracks was an exercise in patience. Patton crafted the tunes, then dropped them in the mail to the musicians who had agreed to lend him a hand — a list that included artists ranging from Kid Koala and Massive Attack to Brazilian chanteuse Bebel Gilberto and Norah Jones (see "Norah Jones Curses Up A Storm For New Mike Patton Project"). "I'd send out a track and start working on something else," said Patton, explaining the Peeping Tom delay. "You don't sit around for the mailman to come, you work on other sh--. And that's what I did. It was really something I worked on over a period of several years that was in the background of my life. "I think I'll approach it differently the second time around," Patton continued; he had intended to release the second Peeping Tom LP this fall, but said it's looking more like 2007 for the follow-up. "I know the process now, and the pitfalls of the process. Maybe I'll rack up some frequent-flyer miles and visit some people and record with them." Patton said he didn't impose deadlines for the first record, so it became "kind of like a long fishing trip, trying to reel in all this stuff." For the second Peeping Tom effort, Patton said he already has several tracks in the can that didn't fit into the overall theme of the first record — songs he'd worked on with producer Richard Devine and Cypress Hill's DJ Muggs. He also has a lengthy wish list of possible collaborators, none of whom he'd mention, "because I don't want to jinx it." One person he's been openly pursuing for the project is Björk. Patton contributed to the Icelandic singer's last LP, the nearly a cappella Medulla, which featured an all-star cast of eccentric vocalists, also including former Roots beatboxer Rahzel, English singer Robert Wyatt and Japanese vocal pyrotechnician Dokaka. "I'm going to see her in a few days, and it's something we've been talking about," he said. "She was supposed to be on this album, but couldn't. We'll eventually find a way to make this work." In the meantime, Peeping Tom has lined up a handful of North American gigs next month, including stops in Costa Mesa, California, on July 20; a pair of shows in Los Angeles on July 23 and 24 (supporting Gnarls Barkley); July 27 in Chicago; and an appearance at the Hedpeth Festival in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, on July 28. This fall, Patton said Peeping will be mounting a full U.S. trek. "This little string of dates kind of materialized and I sort of saw it as a challenge to get it together," he said. "It's a preview, a little teaser." Patton has assembled a band featuring several artists who appear on Peeping Tom : drummer Joe Tomino, bassist Stu Brooks and guitarist Dave Holmes of Dub Trio; keyboardist Keefus Ciancia; backup singer Imani Coppola; DJ Mike Relm; Rahzel; and electronics wizard Alap Momin of Dälek. "There's a few options on the table for this fall," he said. "Massive Attack is going out, we're talking about doing some dates with them. And if we do go out with them, we're going to be doing our own shows on the side. It's a nine-piece band. It's going to be a f---ing party, what can I say?" Patton et al. recently shot a video for first single, "Mojo," with director Matt McDermitt (Backstreet Boys, Motion City Soundtrack) that features cameos by model Rachel Hunter, Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, Blink-182's Mark Hoppus and Patton buddy Danny DeVito. DeVito plays "a guy watching late-night TV in a wife-beater and boxers" who flips through the channels and gets bombarded by "each commercial and infomercial and Bowflex ad you'd see at 2:30 in the morning," with most of the album's collaborators playing roles in the re-created spots. "It's a pretty cute, haunting video," said Patton. "[Nakamura and Hoppus] are thrust into a fake episode of 'Cops,' and they're getting harassed, beat-up and generally abused." As for Patton's other projects, he said Fantômas, which boasts Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne, Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, is on hold until next year. Patton says he's "way behind" on work with Tomahawk, his band with former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, ex-Helmet drummer John Stanier and Melvins bassist Kevin Rutmanis. He's also working with Nakamura on "a whole new thing, which will be just the two of us," he said. "It's going to be kind of like DMX for white people. That's the concept. I think Dan wants me to bark like a dog." And when it comes to his defunct act, Mr. Bungle, Patton said he has no plans to revive the experimental funk-metal band. "Things die for a reason, and in Bungle's case, it was a lot of reasons," he said. "It was great while it lasted, but not something I'd go crawling back to. It was really just one of those things that . it's like when you have friends in high school, and you start creeping up on age 40, those friendships can take other directions and diverge. That's pretty much what happened. "It was basically just a lot of personal differences and differences in the way we approached the band, and work ethic. I wish we could have put more records out. We probably should have," he lamented. "The ones we did put out were OK, though." Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom," a 1960 movie about a man who filmed his victims as they died, broke the rules and crossed the line. It was so loathed on its first release that it was pulled from theaters, and effectively ended the career of one of Britain's greatest directors. Why did critics and the public hate it so? I think because it didn't allow the audience to lurk anonymously in the dark, but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title character. Martin Scorsese once said that this movie, and Federico Fellini's "8 1/2," contain all that can be said about directing. The Fellini film is about the world of deals and scripts and show biz, and the Powell is about the deep psychological process at work when a filmmaker tells his actors to do as he commands, while he stands in the shadows and watches. Scorsese is Powell's most famous admirer. As a child, he studied the films of "the Archers"--the team of director Powell and writer Emric Pressburger. Scorsese haunted the late show screenings of their films, drinking in Powell's bold images and confident, unexpected story development. Powell and Pressburger made some of the best and most successful films of the 1940s and '50s, including "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," with Roger Livesey's great performance spanning three wars; "The Red Shoes," with Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer; "Black Narcissus," with Deborah Kerr as a nun in the Himalayas, and "Stairway To Heaven (A Matter Of Life And Death)," with David Niven as a dead airman. Then came "Peeping Tom." It is a movie about looking. Its central character is a focus puller at a British movie studio; his job is to tend the camera, as an acolyte might assist at the mass. His secret life involves filming women with a camera that has a knife concealed in its tripod; as they realize their fate, he films their faces, and watches the footage over and over in the darkness of his rooms. He is working on a "documentary," he tells people, and only in the film's final shot do we realize it is not only about his crimes, but about his death. He does not spare himself the fate of his victims. This man, named Mark Lewis, has been made into a pitiful monster by his own upbringing. When Helen (Anna Massey), the friendly girl who lives downstairs, shows an interest in his work, he shows her films taken by his father. Films of Mark as a little boy, awakened in the night by a flashlight in his eyes. Films of his father dropping lizards onto his bedclothes as he slept. Tapes of his frightened cries. Mark's father, a psychologist specializing in the subject of fear, used his son for his experiments. When a police psychologist learns the story, he muses, "He has his father's eyes . " There is more. We see little Mark filmed beside his mother's dead body. Six weeks later, another film, as his father remarries. (Wheels within wheels: The father is played by Michael Powell. Mark's childhood home is the London house where Powell was reared, and Mark as a child is played by Powell's son.) At the wedding, Mark's father gives him a camera as a present. For Mark, the areas of sex, pain, fear and filmmaking are connected. He identifies with his camera so much that when Helen kisses him, he responds by kissing the lens of his camera. When a policeman handles Mark's camera, Mark's hands and eyes restlessly mirror the officer's moves, as if Mark's body yearns for the camera and is governed by it. When Helen tries to decide whether she should wear a piece of jewelry on the shoulder or at the neckline, Mark's hands touch his own body in the same places, as if he is a camera, recording her gestures. Powell originally thought to cast Laurence Harvey in the lead, but he settled instead on Karl Boehm, an Austrian actor with such a slight accent in English that it sounds more like diffidence. Boehm was blond, handsome, soft and tentative; Powell was interested to learn that his new star was the son of the famous symphony conductor. He might know something of overbearing fathers. Boehm's performance creates a vicious killer, who is shy and wounded. The movie despises him, yet sympathizes with him. He is a very lonely man. He lives upstairs in a rooming house. The first room is conventional, with a table, a bed, a kitchen area. The second room is like a mad scientist's laboratory, with cameras and film equipment, a laboratory, a screening area, obscure equipment hanging from the ceiling. Helen is startled when he reveals that the house is his childhood home, and he is the landlord: "You? But you walk around as if you can't afford the rent." Helen lives with her mother (Maxine Audley), who is alcoholic and blind, and listens to Mark's footsteps. When Helen tells her mother they're going out together, her mother says, "I don't trust a man who walks so softly." Later Mark surprises the mother inside his inner room, and she cuts right to the heart of his secret: "I visit this room every night. The blind always visit the rooms they live under. What am I seeing, Mark?" Powell's film was released just months before "Psycho" (1960), another shocking film by a British director. Hitchcock's film arguably had even more depraved subject matter than Powell's, and yet it was a boost for his career, perhaps because audiences expected the macabre from Hitchcock but Powell was more identified with elegant and stylized films. There is a major sequence in "Peeping Tom" that Hitchcock might have envied. After hours at the film studio, Mark persuades an extra (Moira Shearer) to stay behind so he can film her dancing. She is almost giddy to have her own solo shots, and dances around a set and even into a big blue trunk. The next day, the body is discovered inside the trunk--while Mark, unseen, films the discovery. The film's visual strategies implicate the audience in Mark's voyeurism. The opening shot is through Mark's viewfinder. Later, we see the same footage in Mark's screening room, in a remarkable shot from behind Mark's head. As the camera pulls back, the image on the screen moves in for a closeup, so the face of the victim effectively remains the same size as Mark's head shrinks. In one shot, Powell shows us a member of the audience being diminished by the power of the cinematic vision. Other movies let us enjoy voyeurism; this one extracts a price. Powell (1905-1990) was a director who loved rich colors, and "Peeping Tom" is shot in a saturated Technicolor with shots such as one where a victim's body under a bright red blanket stands out against the gray street. He was a virtuoso of camera use, and in "Peeping Tom" the basic strategy is to always suggest that we are not just seeing, but looking. His film is a masterpiece precisely because it doesn't let us off the hook, like all of those silly teenage slasher movies do. We cannot laugh and keep our distance: We are forced to acknowledge that we watch, horrified but fascinated. "Peeping Tom" essentially finished Powell's career, although he made more films. By the late 1970s, however, Scorsese was sponsoring revivals and restorations, and joined Powell on the audio commentary tracks of several laser discs. Indeed, Powell and Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, fell in love and married, and she assisted him in writing the most remarkable directorial autobiographies, A Life in Movies and Million-Dollar Movie . Peeping Tom by Rachelle Le-Monnier. Peeping Tom is a Belgian dance theatre company, founded by Gabriela Carrizo (I/AR) and Franck Chartier (F). With Eurudike De Beul, who would become a frequent collaborator at the company, they created a first location project that took place in a trailer home, Caravana (1999). An unstable universe. Everything in Peeping Tom's work starts from a hyperrealist setting. The space feels familiar, such as a garden, a living room and a basement in the first trilogy (Le Jardin, 2002; Le Salon, 2004; Le Sous Sol, 2007), two trailer homes in a snow-covered landscape in 32 rue Vandenbranden (2009) or a retirement home in Vader (2014). The creators then break open this realism. They create an unstable universe that defies the logic of time, space and mood. You become the witness - or rather, the voyeur? - of what usually remains hidden and unsaid. Isolation leads to an unconscious world of nightmares, fears and desires, which the creators deftly use to shed light on the dark side of a character or a community. The huis clos of family situations remains for Peeping Tom a major source of creativity. Presented using a rich imagery, a fascinating battle arises against one's environment and against oneself. New collaborations. Since 2013, Peeping Tom has started to develop productions with other companies and theatres. Gabriela Carrizo created The missing door (2013) with Nederlands Dans Theater. In 2015, she made The Land with Residenztheater in Munich. Franck Chartier directed The lost room (2015) and The hidden floor (2017) with NDT I. In 2013, he worked on 33 rue Vandenbranden , an adaptation of Peeping Tom's original with the dancers of the Göteborg Opera. In 2018, Gabriela and Franck directed 31 rue Vandenbranden . This adaptation of Peeping Tom's show was created with the dancers of the Ballet de l'Opéra de Lyon and opened the Biennale de la Danse in Lyon. Want a Halloween Thriller as Daring as ‘Psycho’? Try ‘Peeping Tom’ Michael Powell’s disturbing chronicle of a murderous filmmaker was ahead of its time, influencing Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Kathryn Bigelow. Gateway Movies offers ways to begin exploring directors, genres and topics in film by examining a few streaming movies. If I had the ability to wipe my memory of one movie and then take a time machine back to watch it at its very first screening, I would pick “Psycho” (1960). I suspect that would be a common choice. The goal wouldn’t simply be to recapture the excitement of my initial viewing long ago — when I braced for the shower scene even though I knew to expect it — but to come to that viewing completely cold, without knowing there was a shower scene at all and without being aware of how boldly Hitchcock would challenge narrative conventions. But Hitchcock wasn’t the only director who released a film in 1960 that pushed the boundaries of onscreen violence or raciness, or that represented a decisive break from anything he had done before. Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” also qualifies and, in some ways, is even more confrontational in raising questions about the audience’s relationship to the screen. Until then, Powell had been one of the leading lights of the British film industry, and the scandalousness of “Peeping Tom” reputedly hastened the end of his career there (although some have argued that the circumstances were more complex). Imagine a “Psycho” told primarily from the killer’s perspective and in which the killer, a filmmaker himself, is equated at various points with both the director and the viewer. “Peeping Tom” has had an enduring influence on filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, who was instrumental in its revival, as well as on Brian De Palma and Kathryn Bigelow, whose “Strange Days” puts a virtual-reality spin on the protagonist’s obsession with orchestrating a particular kind of murder. But the cultural footprint of “Peeping Tom” is surely lighter than that of “Psycho” — which means if you’re lucky, you may be able to experience it fresh, with all its shocks unexpected. (If that’s you, maybe save this article for later.) “Peeping Tom”: Stream it on Amazon Prime, the Criterion Channel or Tubi; rent it on Google Play or iTunes. Powell is not an easy director to box in; his nearly 50 years of filmmaking can’t be reduced to a shorthand description. But he is best known for his work in the 1940s and ’50s with his directing, screenwriting and producing partner, Emeric Pressburger — and particularly for their lavish Technicolor productions like “A Matter of Life and Death” and “The Red Shoes,” both outstanding places to start in a less Halloween-y week. But the first sequence in “Peeping Tom” is like nothing else in Powell’s career — and maybe nothing else until films like John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978) made the serial killer’s point-of-view shot a familiar screen trope nearly two decades later. Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, catch a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more as we explore signs of hope in a changed city. For a year, the “Offstage” series has followed theater through a shutdown. Now we’re looking at its rebound. Much of the sequence plays out through the cross-haired viewfinder of a movie camera, as Mark (Carl Boehm), the man we will soon come to understand is our surrogate, hires a prostitute and stalks her up a stairway to a room, secretly recording her with the Bell & Howell he has hidden in his coat. As he closes in on her, and a glinting light flashes across her face, she screams. Cut to a projector rolling in Mark’s private screening room as he watches the film he’s just shot. Although Mark’s black-and-white footage has no sound, the driving piano score accompanying it transforms the images into something that resembles a vintage silent movie. Being a voyeur, seeing terror and excitement in others’ faces — these are the fundamental ingredients of cinema. Mark knows firsthand the look of fear he wants to capture. As he will explain to Helen (Anna Massey), his neighbor from downstairs, he had no privacy growing up: He was always being filmed by his father (Powell in a cameo), a scientist who wanted a total record of a child’s upbringing. The father was also interested in the nervous system’s reaction to fear, and so he found ways to scare Mark while filming him. What Mark doesn’t reveal to Helen is that he has cultivated his father’s interest, and pushed it to murderous extremes. Mark’s duality — shy artiste and secret killer — extends even to his occupations. He works one job photographing nude women in a space above a newsstand, where the photographs are sold under the table. (Mark is hardly the only one in the movie hiding violence; the first woman we see him photograph asks to be shot in a way that won’t show the bruises inflicted by her fiancé.) More respectably, he works as a focus puller at a film studio, where, amusingly, a director is having trouble getting an actress to faint, despite having a covert master of shock on his crew. As others have noted, Powell doesn’t disguise Boehm’s German accent, which amid the English accents elsewhere is simply another means of keeping us off-balance around Mark. Powell has always been a maximalist when it comes to color and shadow, pushing them well beyond the confines of naturalism and into an almost abstract, primal realm. Some shots in “Peeping Tom” have so many hues, it’s as if he’s trying to capture every color on the spectrum. But even the quieter scenes demonstrate a dazzling and discomforting use of complementary colors. Note how, when Helen and Mark go on a date, Massey and Boehm’s coats have been carefully matched with the decorative palette of the building they live in. The film’s centerpiece — and another stunning use of color — is the second murder. Mark has conspired to keep a stand-in at the studio, Vivian (Moira Shearer), after hours, to film her finally getting a chance to act. She asks what Mark wants her to play. He tells her to mimic being frightened to death — which won’t be hard. The suspense is suitably Hitchcockian: Much as Janet Leigh’s shower leading up to her murder lulls viewers even as they subconsciously await the worst, Vivian is shown, at great length, dancing to a jazz number to warm up for her big scare scene. The sequence holds up a dark mirror to “The Red Shoes.” In that film, Shearer played a ballet dancer who was prepared to dance until she dropped dead. In “Peeping Tom,” she dances to her death unwittingly. In another Hitchcockian sequence, while Mark and Helen are on a date, Powell cuts back to Mark’s darkroom, where the tick-tick of a timer is measuring the development of the film on which Mark has recorded Vivian’s murder. “Peeping Tom” arrived early in a wave of cinema that deigned to deconstruct the medium and show its tools: Mark is a one-man camera crew, director, film processor and — more obliquely — sound man. And while the movie’s power as a pure thriller endures, the film also leaves viewers with a disturbing implication: that we, as spectators who want more movies and more thrills, on some level always root for Mark to succeed.